A Modern Take on Modern War.

2010.02.18

Moshtarak - So Far So COIN (Counterintuitive)

I began my counterinsurgency (COIN) journey only very recently. But I have made headway. I’m reading Thompson at the moment (probably half way through), John Nagl’s Eating Soup With A Knife arrived in the post yesterday. I am also reading Pete Mansoor’s Baghdad at Sunrise.

These books, and discussions with ArmitageShanks, have helped increase my understanding of the ways in which soldier-scholars perceive COIN. It seems that the recent Operation Moshtarak is counterintuitive counterinsur-gency.

To quote, at length, from Robert Thompson:

“rebuilding of [a] country so that it can once again become economically and politically stable and viable … cannot be achieved merely by the application of absolute force to the situation. It is just possible that force might achieve a temporary victory; but it would leave almost every single internal problem unsolved. You cannot win the game merely by changing the rules.”

By implementing the use of force in Moshtarak, NATO and its Afghan partners are contravening this basic tenet of COIN. This article at the Kings of War blog, makes a good deal of sense to me, in terms of a firm criticism of NATO’s mission.

I was skeptical when I started reading it; the whole Olympic analogy took a while to make sense, but this part in particular caught my eye:

“As hard as it may be, there are metrics involved in figuring this out. There must be, because there is no end to officials–NATO and national officials, military and civilian–who claim that ‘things are getting better’ all the time. Their yardsticks include ‘number of ISAF soldiers killed’, ‘number of IEDs discovered’, ‘percentage of Afghan civilians who support the central government’, etc. etc. Kinda like ‘artistic interpretation’ in Ice Dancing: its all in the eye of the beholder.”

The idea of interpretive metrics strikes me as being very similar to the way in which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) operates. From my experience studying the drugs war in Afghanistan, I found that the UNODC will frequently use poor metrics to prove a point, when, just like all statistics, they can be interpreted in myriad ways, to serve a plethora of purposes.

“Balkh province may be poppy-free, but its center, Mazar-i Sharif, is awash in drug money. Nangarhar was also poppy-free in 2008, although it still remains a province where a large amount of opiates is trafficked.”

Further evidence of this from a report by David Mansfield and Adam Pain from the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit:

“The problems associated with assessing counter-narcotics achievements purely in terms of the hectarage of opium poppy grown are compounded by confusion over attribution. […] For example, reductions in the level of cultivation in the north, northeast and central provinces are primarily attributed to successful counter-narcotics efforts.[1] Yet due to an overall rise in global food prices, the more recent decline in opium price, the Government of Pakistan’s ban on wheat exports and lower rainfall in Afghanistan, there has been a signiﬁcant shift away from opium poppy in favour of the terms of trade on wheat.”

So the assessment by the Faceless Bureaucrat at the Kings of War blog is entirely fair. The American Army, despite writing books and articles until it is blue in the face, appears incapable of learning on the fly, as is vital when running counterinsurgency operations.[2] We shall see what happens as the operation progresses, but I remain pessimistic about it's long term prospects.